The nice thing about this period before the campaign starts is the questions rolling in. Now, I understand that some folks may not see that as their idea of “nice”, so I’ll explain quickly before going onto the subject proper.
Nice – the design of having a month or more to prepare for a campaign is to give people a chance to get to know the game, play a few battles and feel more comfortable with their chosen gang and the rules system. Naturally, this will mean people ask questions. I point this out because I want you to ask questions as often and as freely as you need to. It means that any discrepancies will be quickly spotted and answers provided here in the blog for folks to refer to in the future as well.
So without further ado I thought I would explain the gang tactics cards a little bit. This coming from a discussion in the chat around different deck boxes.
The best place to start is in 2017 with the relaunch of Necromunda. This edition of Necromunda is often referred to as N’17. This is mainly because there has never really been a clear definition of editions – and perhaps I will do a piece on this at a later date!
However, with the relaunch of the game in 2017 came a new starter set as seen in the picture below:
As you will note, there are cards on show in the image of the contents of this set. This is where gang tactics cards were introduced. The other type of cards introduced here are fighter cards which list the stats of the individual fighters in your gang, each getting their own card, along with their weapon sets. Yaktribe handily converts your gang into these cards and we recommend you use that rather than writing on these cards, as fighter’s stats and equipment changes somewhat frequently.
The gang tactic cards provide a little added extra to games. A moment of brilliance – a fighter suddenly getting a boost of energy after seeing an enemy go down, which carries them further when moving, quick reflexes allowing shots to be fired before a model can complete the action they were making or secret ductways or tunnels that allow fighters to steal an advance ahead of the battle and sneak into a more forward position.
There are two types of gang tactic card, generic cards which identify themselves simply as “gang tactics” at the bottom, or house specific cards that identify themselves by the name of the gang, for example “Escher Tactics” at the bottom of the card.
Back in 2017, Necromunda, released with the starter set above, was then followed up by a series of books known ast he Gang War series. These contained rules that expanded Necromunda from the 2d tile based game seen in the starter set, known as Zone Mortalis, to the 3d game referred to as Sector Mechanicus. It also introduced rules for each of the house gangs.
With each Gang War book release that featured a gang, there were releases of gang tactics cards relating to those gangs. For the purpose of easy reference, we’ll call this era of gang tactics cards ‘1st wave’.
This is an example of one of the 1st Wave gang tactics boxes – this one being for Goliaths:
The 1st wave gang tactics deck boxes generally consisted of 8 gang specific tactics cards, 10 generic tactics cards and a number of blank fighter cards. Super useful as it meant that if you were buying into more than one gang, or even if you weren’t, you’d get 10 generic cards that could be used with any gang.
This was especially true when considering non-house gangs which were introduced via White Dwarf or via free PDF’s on the warhammer-community website. These included Venators, Genestealer Cultists and Chaos Cultists.
The 2nd Wave
This phase ended with the end of the Gang War series and the introduction of the hard back Necromunda rulebook and the hard back Gangs of the Underhive book (GotU) as seen above. These were released at the end of 2018 and ushered in the next phase of the game. For ease, we’ll call this the ‘2nd wave’.
Following the release of the new Rulebook and the Gangs of the Underhive, we were told that we would see the House gangs further developed and that this was the only time we would see an omnibus type book released – referring to GotU.
What followed were the books we have only recently seen the last of released – the ‘House of …’ books. This includes the ‘Book of …’ books as well, but in relation to gang tactics cards, we will be focusing on the former.
Over the next couple of years each quarter saw the release of a book, many of these belonged to the House gangs but it took a couple of years to get through them all due to Covid-19 and releasing some other books as well (Book of Peril, Book of Ruin, Book of Judgement).
Like with the 1st Wave, each House specific book was accompanied by a new box of house gang tactics cards. This time, their contents were/are different. They appear to no longer contain the generic gang tactics cards and instead only contain specific house cards. So they are made up of 18 house specific cards and a number of blank fighter cards.
To compare with the 1st wave Goliath tactics box earlier in this piece, here is an image of the latest Goliath tactics cards set:
Poison Spurs 